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Of his successor I never heard any evil sung, though I remember once hearing a great crowd of soldiers and civilians at Genoa shouting monotonously. "Viva, viva il Generale Dia!" The refrain of the stornelli was onomatopoeic, and was intended to represent the sound of gunfire. "Bim Bim Bom, Bim Bim Bom, Al rombo del cannon." What a theatrical country Italy is!
It would have afforded him a capital example of the fact that considerable differences in the form and sound of words meaning the same thing prove nothing against the onomatopoeic theory, but merely that the same sound represents a different thing to different ears.
Yet 'bemused, perhaps, is the word that Herbert Minks would have chosen for one of his poems, to describe a state of mind he, however, had never experienced himself. And he would have chosen it instinctively for onomatopoeic reasons because it hums and drones and murmurs dreamily. 'Puzzled' was too sharp a word.
At such times, were the grossest pieces of onomatopoeic representation the song of a bird, the galloping of horses, the cries of children, or the laughing of demons to be introduced into the symphony, I should not be offended. Very likely I should be pleased; they would afford new points of departure for new trains of romantic feeling or heroic thought. I know very well what has happened.
Or he will enlarge, as in the Life of Addison, upon the definition of a simile, the use of similes in poetry, and the distinction between them and what he calls "exemplifications"; or, as in that of Pope, upon the subject of representative metres and onomatopoeic words.
This device like alliteration is a method of intensifying the expression of a passage, and is frequently adopted by the poets. In another famous onomatopoeic line "Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum" Virgil imitates the sound of a galloping horse, and the shaking of the ground beneath its hoofs.
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